Bookshelves

Monday, January 5, 2015

Resolutions Report - Week 1

The first week of the new year is past and I was able to cross off nearly all of my New Year Resolutions! The one that still needs much work is sticking to our daily schedule and cleaning routine, but we definitely made progress last week. I made a monthly calendar for each goal, and broke the goal up into daily or weekly tasks. For instance, for the goal of reading the Bible in a year I made a calendar with verses to read written on each day. For the goal of 52 Projects, I wrote one specific project across each week. I found a chart that I printed for the 52 Week Savings goal. I then used a highlighter to mark off my progress. It's been really helpful to have a visual of where I am in working towards these goals. Ah, accomplishment and balance in life is such a great feeling!

Photobook gifts completed!

I used the time of his afternoon nap to work on this week's 52 Projects project. I had decided to make photobooks of this last year for Christmas gifts. I informed each recipient that their gift or part of their gift would arrive after the new year because I needed the full year to finish (I wanted to include Tennyson's first Christmas). I worked on creating the first book last week and over the weekend. It was so tough to decided which pictures to include and exclude. However, I had a specific budget amount for each individual and aimed to cap the number of pages at each budgeted amount. As I said, last week my project was to complete a book for one side of the family. This week's project was to complete the book for the other side of the family. The second one was much faster to accomplish since I was essentially just editing the first. All I had to do was remove the photos of one side of the family and replace them with the other side. Since this was part of their gift my budget was even less (we had gone in with other sibling for a collective gift as well), and so I also had to remove several pages. I was still able to finish and order it all within Tennyson's afternoon nap today. I'm probably going to regret not getting a nap myself, but I am glad to have this week's project already done for this week! That frees up the rest of the week for projects and other preparations for his birthday party next week. :) I aim to soon complete the other photobooks started but not finished. I plan to edit the 2014 photobook yet again by adding many more photos. This will be our copy and replace having to store printed photos. (I'll also order a photo cd of all photos to store in the back of the album so that they can't be lost in a computer failure). I also started a pregnancy journal book for my pregnancy with Tennyson a while ago. I pulled up my blog regnancy updates and photos and recreated them into a photobook. (I'm so glad I documented the journey!) This month can be summed up as "photobook" month! It will be so good to have them done and here to look at over and over! I'll also be glad that my children will be able to look at the books and we share stories for years to come!